Katie Pine isn't the only youngster to have gone missing in the town of Algonquin Bay. With Cardinal's hunch she'd been murdered now proved right, he was back on the case, looking for her killer even as he reopened the files on three other missing kids. But Cardinal is partnered this time by Lisa Delorme, newly shifted to homicide from the Office of Special Investigations. Could their pairing have more sinister implications? Could she have been sent to investigate Cardinal? A guilty conscience makes him think so.

A tormented cop whose life and career are falling apart. A French-Canadian female police officer with three strikes against her: her sex, her ethnicity, and her six years investigating dirty cops. A police department with something rotten in it -- too many busts gone south, too many tips coming up empty. And a pattern of missing kids found mutilated, tortured,murdered -- a pattern that screams "serial killer".

As Cardinal and Delorme work out a modus vivandi in order to solve the cases, they soon recognize the pattern -- and realize that time is running out before the killer strikes again.

"Forty Words for Sorrow" is a work of excruciating tension that does not let up. It is a brilliant portrayal of two twisted killers, frightening but somehow human in their monstrousness. And it is a truthful rendering of an anguished cop whose own human faults fuel his need for justice. It is the first in a series featuring Cardinal and Delorme. The next, The Glittering Woods, will take place largely in the Eastern United States.